Contemporary Voices in Creative Writing

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As we check our smart phones after every ping, we fail to concentrate on any one thing for more than a few minutes. In an age where we turn the lens on ourselves more than towards our lovers, is it still possible to love each other? In this new millennium, where we right-swipe for the next date, look for love in online match algorithms, and check new messages both during dinner and between the bed sheets, are we still capable of loving? Or are we forever held prisoner by the short-lived act of falling in love, over and over again?

The fiction, poetry, and interviews in Love 2.0 depict a multifaceted vision of romance in our modern era. This issue features a new collection of minifiction by Arthur C. Clarke award-winner Jeff Noon and creative writing by April Pierce, Rob Hartzell, Shalini Adnani, Liza Dezfouli, Eleanor Gall, Kathleen Latham, Carter Vance, and more. Together they explore, challenge, and ultimately redefine the experience of falling in love for the 21st century. The issue also presents interviews with Jeff Noon and author, columnist, and prolific tweeter Dana Schwartz and asks them their thoughts on writing and romance in the modern era.

In Love 2.0, nineteen different writers share their diverse stories and perspectives on romance and relationships in our increasingly digital age. What does it tell us about love? And what does it tell us about ourselves?

More than 90 Somali nationals were deported from the United States at the end of January. They are being returned to a country of strife that they crossed an ocean to flee.

Writing in the most recent issue of the London Reader, Somali-born Ali Dahir tells the story of his persecution in Somalia and later Ethiopia as well as his detainment as a refugee in the United States, where he was held at the South Texas Detention Center.

“When I came to the United States, I never expected a situation like I experienced in detention. Perhaps I expected a warmer reception. I faced a lot of problems in the immigration jail: racism, discrimination, and abuse both at the hands of the officers and the other detainees. I had no dignity left after being terrorized by the police in Ethiopia, but I was not immune to the words hurled at me in the detention centre.

“Behind the razor wires, steel bars, and concrete walls of the prisons, the Muslim inmates are treated the worst. We were the objects of sarcasm and ridicule by other inmates. If you tried to complain to the officers, they normally sided with the detainees. I regularly heard mocking calls and jeers, like ‘Hey Osama! Did you come to bomb the US or do you just want to bomb the cell?’ Muslim detainees are the longest-serving detainees.”

CHILD: “Mother, where is our house?”
Mother: “Son, it’s been crushed. But don’t be scared. We will build another one.”
Child: “Mother, where is my school?”
Mother: “Son, the tent became your school.”
Child: “Mother, what is the future?”
Mother: “My son, the future’s unknown — nobody knows it except God.”

These stories, drawings, and photographs come from a small group of Syrian girls aged 11 to 16. The girls are living in Akré Refugee Camp, a former-Suddam Hussein intelligence centre, in Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. The refugees’ houses are former holding cells. The camp has a heavy presence. When the building was first opened, all you would have seen, in every direction, was the peeling, yellow walls and, hung large on the 2nd floor, the Kurdish flag. Standing in the centre of the camp, turning in a circle, you would have seen the same image, again and again. The bareness. The despair.

When the children arrived in the camp, this scene of desolation and misery is all they had left to call home. The children had fled the Syrian war, some on horseback, many on foot, across the desert. They had been lined up at checkpoints, counted, told where to avoid landmines, and sent to the camps. Many of the children had lost relatives, and some had seen bodies scattered in the streets. Here, at the camp, the horrors that these young children witnessed are not spoken of. They are dealt with silently, gently, and personally.

The children, however, transformed the camp, reclaimed the space, called it their own. Over the last two years, the children have covered nearly every available wall with their thoughts, their feelings, their anger, their misery, their longing for the past, and their hopes for the future.

The London Reader is issuing an open call for short stories, minifiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and art that explore love in the digital and narcissistic age.

“Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.” – Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

#DigitalLove: Checking our smartphones after every ping, we fail to concentrate on any one thing for more than a few minutes. Lacking the ability to delay gratification, we’ve no patience, no faith; we want it all and we want it now. In an age where we turn the lens on ourselves more than towards our lovers, is it still possible to love each other? In this new age, where we right-swipe for the next date, look for love in online match algorithms, flirt with 2D emoijis, and check new messages both during dinner and between the bed sheets, are we still capable of loving? Or are we held prisoner by the short-lived act of falling in digital love, over and over again?

What to Submit: Short stories, minifiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and art can be stand alone pieces or collections, but should be less than 4,000 words or no more than 6 images for photography/art. Submissions can be true to life or speculative fiction. Final selection will be weighed in favour of shorter works.

How to Submit: Email submissions or questions to coordinator@LondonReader.uk and place ‘DIGITALLOVE’ in the subject line. Please include a biographical personal statement in the body of the e-mail, and indicate whether the submitted pieces have been previously published and if you hold the publication rights to them.

In the 21st century — in which nearly 70 million people are forcibly displaced and 244 million live outside their country of birth — home is a more elusive concept than ever, and it is one that is often entwined with feelings of loss. In this issue of the London Reader we hear from under-represented voices from around the world as we explore themes of belonging, migration, identity, and lost homes. Through the photography, poetry, short stories, and writing of refugees, migrants, and others, we will take you on an extraordinary journey through the lives of people who are all, in their own way, trying to find “home”.

“Home: Stories of identity, belonging, loss, and migration” features an interview with two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji and an interview and excerpt from author and aid-worker Saleem Haddad. The issue also presents an excerpt from Selina Siak Chin Yoke’s first novel as well as short fiction and poetry from Beena Nadeem, April Pierce, Eleanor Gall, and others. In addition to showcasing photography from rural Afghanistan, Winter 2016 is a Special Extended-Length Issue that features the artwork and stories of Syrian children from the Akré refugee camp in Iraq, whose program will receive 10 percent of the revenue from this issue.

Subscribe now to access to the most recent issue. Because Home is a previous issue, you can donate whatever you want, and receive a download link to the PDF:

The London Reader is a cooperative magazine, so your donation goes directly to support the writers, artists, and collaborators who made the Autumn 2016 issue.

“A glitch on Friday afternoon led Facebook to declare two million users, including Zuckerberg himself, prematurely dead. People logged in to their accounts to find that they had been ‘memorialized'” –The Guardian

Our lives and technology have intertwined with often uncanny fallout. In the Autumn issue of the London Reader, #cyberpunkNOW, a piece of minifiction by Benn Ward looks at the eerie cybershade that lives on in social media after a person’s death:

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Contrailsby Benn Ward

I HAD WORK in the morning, my first day back after the funeral, but I sat awake in the light of my computer screen, clicking through Dad’s Facebook page.

Condolences and prayers were still popping up on his wall—“You were the best coach I could have asked for. Thank you,” and, “Steve and I will always remember you. Love, Cherryl”—as if they were writing to his smiling profile picture taken at the top of Mount Rundle.

All of his Likes were in the present tense too. Curling. Hiking. He hadn’t played cribbage in years, but it was listed there. His most recent photo was from a friend’s retirement party in February at the Westwood Lodge, when he could still walk.

His last status was just beneath the condolences, asking if anyone had a spare 20 litre pot they could lend our family for Easter Dinner. He had trouble chewing solid foods, and Mom was going to make a soup.

These photographs, these words, this contrail of his life, is all that’s left. But none of the pictures showed him in his hospital bed, unspeaking, shaking, as he grasped my hand.

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To read more of the #cyberpunkNOW issue, including another piece of minifiction in the “Facebook Family Furnishings” series by Benn Ward, subscribe or donate to the London Reader.

“In the project ‘3 Years and 6 Months of Digital Decay’ developed in association with the Arebyte gallery, I set up an online platform where a digital video will be more and more fragmented as time passes until the image disappears entirely three and half years after the launch of the website. Vicktor Mayer-Schonberger has talked about how digital media remembers so much information that we know less than the digital remembers. Because digital media can identically duplicate memories (unlike analogue), digital memories are immortal to begin with. If this immortal memory reaches every aspect of our lives (like search engines that can track every click we make online), the information may become beyond our control. Through my artwork, I want us to observe and think about how technologies of forgetting (or auto-decay) can be implemented in our lives and consider whether this technology is desirable for us.”

Shinji Toya’s artwork is featured in the latest issue of the London Reader, #cyberpunkNOW

“3 Years and 6 Months of Digital Decay” is a digital art project that Toya exhibited at the Internet Yami-Ichi event at the Tate Modern in London in association with Arebyte Gallery.

Toya is a multimedia artist originally from Japan, now based in London. He has been awarded the Contagious Nova Award in Lowe and Partner’s Nova Award Series. Toya’s practice is predominantly digital, and involves a range of diverse creative approaches such as moving-image, print, painting, computer programming, digital installation, and website. You can find him online at cargocollective.com/stoya

Global Voices: Perspectives from Around the WorldDeadline: extended to October 30, 2016

Home is the where the heart is, but the heart may be far from home…

An upcoming issue of the London Reader will catch glimpses of the people, the geography, and the memories that make us call a place home. It will look at what it means to build a home; to live in a home; and ultimately, to leave a home or to have a home destroyed. In the 21st century—in which nearly 70 million people are forcibly displaced and 244 million live outside their country of birth—home is a more elusive concept than ever, and it is one that is often entwined with loss.

The London Reader is seeking poetry, minifiction, short fiction, non-fiction, and photography/art from under-represented voices from all over the world that explore belonging, alienation, forced migration, job relocation, and identity. All submissions within these themes will be considered, but narratives from women, the LGBTQ community, people of colour, migrants, and those from low and middle-income countries will be given priority.

Submissions can be stand alone pieces or collections, but should be less than 4,000 words or no more than 5 images for photography/art, and shorter pieces are preferred. Works will be accepted in Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Kurdish, and French and will appear in English translation. All other submissions should be in English.

Email submissions or questions to coordinator@londonreader.uk. Place ‘GLOBAL VOICES’ in the subject line. Please include a personal statement of less than 250 words in the body of the e-mail, and indicate whether the submitted pieces have been previously published and if you hold the publication rights to them.

// The economy and climate are collapsing. Borders are being built up. Yet everyone is connected moreso than ever before. CEOs and squatters with smartphones are conjoined in the consensual mass hallucination. Relationships are right-swiped, and exes hack each other’s accounts. Cryptocurrencies buy research chemicals on the darkweb. Social media pages become memorials to the dead. Hashtags spark revolutions. Mass surveillance is both the business model of the internet and business as usual in the perpetual war on terror. Is this cyberpunk? Is this dystopia? Who cares?

// This is #cyberpunkNOW

// This issue of the London Reader features interviews with the founders of Cyberpunk—William Gibson and Bruce Sterling—and Sci-Fi author Kim Stanley Robinson, as well fiction by Ike Hamil, Stephen Arseneault, George Bartlett, and more. #cyberpunkNOW focuses on short stories, minifiction, poetry, and art that explore the deep-reaching personal, social, and political implications of technology on our lives, re-examining society through the lenses of cyberpunk and science fiction.

// #cyberpunkNOW is dedicated to the memory of Lukas Mariman, 1972-2016.

// As a previous issue, you can read it now by donating whatever you want to the issue’s creators. Mention you’d like the #cyberpunkNOW issue in the Paypal form, and receive a complimentary PDF:

The London Reader is a non-profit cooperative magazine; your contribution supports the writers, artists, and collaborators who make each issue

In the next issue of the London Reader, Alexander Maurice introduces us to the works and voices of the cyberpunk genre and interviews two of its founding authors: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Autumn 2016 releases this September.

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Published quarterly, the London Reader brings you the best known and new voices in creative writing. The content in each issue is curated around a central topic and introduced by a renowned or notable figure in the field.